It’s quiet outside. The world is sleeping and I shouldn’t be here. I should be asleep, but here is where the writing happens. It’s a place that the ghosts of the eloquent words finally come gently to my dancing fingers. Like intricate little knots, stories need to be understood before they can be written. Sometimes its as simple as the right words providing the momentum that coerces the string. Flopping into a loose and beautiful pattern. Sometimes it’s so much harder than that.
Some knots are fiendish. Stretching out in a complex wriggle for days or months. Such things only yield at the very end. The last loop coming undone in the realisation that you’ve softly slipped its neighbours away. It’s an exercise in patience – a tug too soon and it clenches, re-weaves and locks down harder. So it is with knots, so it is with life.
Because so little of what I write here is ever literal.
Except perhaps the writing where I actually count things. And this. The rest is anything but.
The plain truth of the recent weeks is that I am busy working my metaphorical fingers on a massive existential knot. When it finally unfolds, I will be free to tell a long and most enthralling story, but until then it remains one of those long knots. The ones that are too intricate, too big, and too entangled to be tugged to early. And probably on a par with the last great shift in my life.
So if I’ve been quiet, it’s not for much longer. These nimble fingers, restless mind and occasionally buffoonish wit have simply been otherwise occupied. But no knot is forever. There is nothing that cannot, in the end, be not only untied, but ultimately rethreaded into any weave we want.
And so these fingers continue. So they dance. So shall they prevail.
Whatever the knots and the nuance, there’s always a photograph. And occasionally a clue for the quick.